Yes, there's no sane way to avoid this, not without dramatically increasing database load for a very rare case.
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Nick Craver♦Mar 9 '12 at 15:50

3

@NickCraver - Sure there is, a one-liner of javascript to hide the row of the content of the score line is 0 (or if there are no children, or whatever). Not everything needs to be fixed on the backend.
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eykanalApr 12 '12 at 12:53

@eykanal - A 0 may be +15 and -15, both valid changes which isn't fetched or known to the page at this time...fetching that is the "dramatically increasing database load" I mentioned above. It's not as simple as you suppose...trust me.
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Nick Craver♦Apr 12 '12 at 12:58

4

@NickCraver Would it be feasible for the details partial view to render a message explaining there's nothing to show? Something like "No actions resulted in an appreciable change" (but less awkwardly worded) in the case where it didn't actually generate any rows. I get why you can't know in advance, but I think the empty space comes off as a bit weird to people.
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Tim StoneApr 12 '12 at 13:08

1

@NickCraver - So, I see that the loaded-body row isn't populated until the triangle is clicked. However, when clicked, it's easy to tell whether it's empty or not... it's a check whether the child table tbl-reputation has any rows. I guess you could, on page load, automatically populate the table for rows with "total rep = 0", detect empty ones, and not show them, but at the cost (as you said) of a few more database hits per pageload, which is a non-trivial tradeoff.
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eykanalApr 12 '12 at 13:20

@NickCraver - by the way, I don't think this is as rare as you think... I have two 0-rep rows on my screen, and it seems that the two other folks here also see a few on their rep page.
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eykanalApr 12 '12 at 13:21

5

@TimStone: "Your reputation changed, but it has no effect" "Your reputation was eaten by a Grue" "Nothing to look at here" "0-Damage dealt to your reputation" "Reputation changes were reflected by the magic shield" "Hi, I slipped and accidentally deleted some records from the database, but everything should be fine now, you won't miss this reputation"
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Time Traveling BobbyApr 12 '12 at 13:29

1

@Tim - aye, that we can do, I'll take a peek here in a bit
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Nick Craver♦Apr 12 '12 at 14:22